Prodo Laboratories Inc. and Invenio Insitute are announced at the Rachmiel Levine Diabetes and Obesity Symposium.
Irvine, Ca. Two new diabetes companies, Prodo Laboratories, Inc. and Invenio Institute, announced their launch at the Rachmiel Levine Diabetes and Obesity Symposium held last week in Long Beach, CA. Prodo Laboratories, Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company located in Irvine, CA, will provide primary human islets as a research service to corporate investigators and will offer islet research tissue culture media, reagents, and factors to diabetes researchers. In addition to pursuing its own research programs, it will also provide small company incubator opportunities in diabetes. Invenio Institute, a California public benefit company also in Irvine, CA, is a new diabetes research institute that will begin providing human islets to academic researchers as it builds its diabetes research program.
David W. Scharp, MD, Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of both new companies, stated “These two companies will focus their initial efforts on increasing the availability of primary human islets for research and providing high quality research reagents to diabetes investigators. It is important to build these two new diabetes companies now with the serious increase in the incidence of diabetes in the world’s population, driving a critical need for new research efforts.”
Dr. Scharp has had a long and productive career in diabetes and islet transplantation research and was a co-founder of Cytotherapeutics, Inc (1989) and a co-founder of Novocell, Inc. (1999), where he recently resigned to pursue these new opportunities. He has published over 200 scientific papers and holds 13 patents.
Diabetes is a world wide, major health problem with its complications leading to blindness, increased risk of heart attack and stroke, gangrene and amputation, impotence, and significantly reduced quality of life. The USA is seeing major increases in this disease at much younger age of onset with estimates of diagnosed diabetes now reaching the 40 million level.